Believe it or not, you don’t need a fancy camera to capture those Fourth of July fireworks.

Your smartphone will work fine. All you need is to follow these pointers:

1. The flash is not your friend

At most, keeping your flash on will just brighten up the scene within a few feet of you. At worst, it will delay your phone’s camera and you’ll miss the moment. Always remember to turn the flash off when photographing at night.

2. No HDR

HDR or High Dynamic Range is a tool you can use with scenes that have high contrast. An example would be a shadowy cityscape with a bright, cloudy sky. You try to expose the photo on your phone’s screen and either the buildings are really dark or the sky is really blown-out. The HDR tool takes a couple of pictures and puts them together, trying to get the best of both worlds. None of this works at night. All it will do if anything is create a lot of “noise” in your photo and give it that gross, grainy look.

You can find night photography apps for smartphones by searching online. I used NightCap for the firefly photo above. The app lets you create long exposures that give some of the little lightning bugs that streaking effect. It can be a fun way to photograph sparklers, stars or get fireworks streaking across the sky. Warning: It has a tendency to crash so I recommend clearing your camera roll to free-up space on your phone.

This is important for fireworks. Smartphones have a tendency to lag by a second or two after you hit the shutter button. If you aren’t using a long exposure, then practice your timing so you get the big bang and not the fizzle.